Читать книгу The Challoners - E F Benson - Страница 4

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Lady Sunningdale had few habits, and was thus very adaptable, but one was to make a punctual first appearance half an hour before luncheon. Her appearance, though long-delayed, was brilliant when it came, and it was as if a fresh and many-coloured sun had arisen to take the shine out of the splendour of the noon-day. Years were the only things in which she was no longer young, but the youthfulness of her mind, tastes, character was perfectly spontaneous and natural, and she still retained to the full all the eager curiosity of youth, all youth’s insatiable appetite for pleasure. In person she was very tall and largely made, but she moved with exquisite briskness and vigour, and, though stout, still clung to her waist. Her hat generally contained a perfect aviary of birds perched about on it, and her dresses to match her tastes were rather youthful in cut and colour. She wore also white satin shoes with extremely high heels, which had been known, when she walked in wet or clayey places, to be drawn with a cloop, like the drawing of a cork, completely off her feet, the heel being driven into the ground by her weight in the manner of a nail. But, as a rule, she avoided clayey places; indeed, she seldom walked at all, except at this stated time, half an hour before luncheon. But she made up for her lack of walking by talking; this she did on all occasions to as many people as possible, and was extremely entertaining.

She was staying now (she spent the greater part of her life in staying) for a rather extensive weekend, that is to say from Friday till Monday, with Lord Flintshire, and the morning after her arrival came radiantly downstairs at a quarter-past one. Two irrepressible dachshunds barked excitedly round her, and as she stepped on to the terrace where her host was sitting, she was trying, without the least success, to put up a pale-blue sunshade with a handle of Saxe-china.

“Dear Flints,” she cried, “how sweet of you to wait for me! Where is everybody? Yes. Isn’t it a divine morning? Everything looks as if it had been washed during the night. Why is one such a fool as ever to leave the country and go to London? If one had a single spark of originality one would never go near it. Yes. Please put up my sunshade for me. I know I look hideous this morning; but it doesn’t matter how one looks in the country, which is another of its charms. But I didn’t sleep a wink—I never close my eyes in the country; really, London is the place to live in. I have contradicted myself, have I not? Who cares? I’m sure I don’t. Where are the dogs? Please whistle on your fingers, if you can. So piercing, is it not? There they are! Ah, how naughty! Yes, who cares whether one contradicts one’s self? It shews, in fact, that one’s powers of sympathy and of seeing other points of view are defective, unless one sees both sides of every question, and upholds both vehemently. Yes, do let us walk down the terrace. I adore walking. Oh, Suez Canal, running over the flower-beds like that! How naughty!”

“Suez Canal?” interpolated Lord Flintshire, who, walking by her side, looked like a small rowing-boat towed by a brig in full sail.

“Yes, don’t you see how dreadfully long he is? Now tell me all about your brother who dined here last night. I thought him too fascinating, and we had a great talk about somebody called Kennet, I think he said. Mr. Chancellor is very high-church, is he not? His mouth looked to me high-church. There is something perfectly beautiful about high-church mouths. Look at Lady Otterbourne’s: her mouth is exactly like your brother’s. So is the Bishop of Tavistock’s, whom I adore. He plays the flute divinely, looking funnier than anything I ever saw—so funny that I never want to laugh. Somehow a bishop playing on a flute—or do I mean low-church? I think I must mean low-church. And so your brother is Martin’s father. I sent a message by him last night to tell Martin to come and see me this afternoon. I completely lost my heart to Martin last winter. It is terrible to lose one’s heart when one is fifty, because one has already lost one’s looks, so that it leaves one really denuded. Besides it seems so careless. That is a chestnut, I think. But everything worth saying has been said years before even I was born. Where is Suez? Naughty!”

Lady Sunningdale’s conversation flowed in the manner of a river in flood; it flowed over everything, it foamed and spouted, and there was always the sense—never left unjustified—that there was plenty more to come. It flowed, in fact, over so many different subjects that her interlocutor had a practically limitless range of topics from which to select the matter of his reply; on the other hand, he could fly off on any tangent of his own without initiating incongruity, or, again, he could be silent, completely confident that Lady Sunningdale would go on. But the last topic suited Lord Flintshire very well.

“Do tell me what you think of Martin,” he said.

“But too fascinating and a genius. That combination is so rare; geniuses are usually quite unpresentable. He was staying with us at Easter, and I used to borrow him, as one borrows a book and tries to forget to return it. Where is Sahara? Will you whistle again, please. And his playing—well, merely sublime. He can even play Wagner on the piano. Orchestral music on the piano is generally detestable, but Martin—I used to tell him I believed he had instruments concealed about his person. He is quite clever enough to. My dear, you can hear the strings. Then he used to draw me caricatures of all the extremely tiresome people who were in the house. And his mimicry! Sunningdale finding fault with the soup, and me telling him he was a gross feeder. My dear Flint, I could have sworn it was us. You know the charming way we behave at dinner. Frank Yorkshire, too—you would have thought that nobody could have imitated Frank. But Martin—‘Beauty is probably evil in its origin, which accounts for the extreme plainness of good people!’ Simply too killing. I suppose your low-church brother doesn’t approve of him, or appreciate him. A slight frigidity occurred when I mentioned Martin!”

“He certainly doesn’t appreciate all the excellencies you have mentioned. I doubt if he really knows they exist.”

“That is always the way,” said Lady Sunningdale, with a florid gesture of despair. “That very rare product, a natural artistic genius, always makes its wayward appearance in utterly uncongenial places. I am bound to say it usually leaves them before long; but what a waste of time! Dear Flints, don’t walk quite so fast. I had no idea this terrace was so interminable. We shall be miles from the house when we reach the end. Where are my angels? But it really is a pity. And I suppose his father will make a curate or a Greek scholar of him.”

“That is just what he is afraid he will not do. He was talking to me about it last night.”

Lady Sunningdale’s attention suddenly and completely wandered.

“You should build a pergola here, Flints,” she said. “There is a pergola at Frank Yorkshire’s villa in Capri, which is the most divine thing I ever saw, covered with roses. We used to dine there, and earwigs dropped into one’s hair, and from the dark one heard those extraordinary Italian melodies from the piazza. That is where I should like to live, to leave the world utterly and entirely and just exist. So unworldly. Yes. My angels, they want their dinner, and so does their mamma.”

They had got to the end of the terrace, and Lady Sunningdale gazed about her with roving, abstracted eyes. She never did anything, even gaze, without her thoughts being occupied with something totally different, and now as she looked over the great swelling lines of downs which flowed and melted into each other like interlacing muscles away to the horizon, across the hollow where the roofs and grey spires of Winchester trembled in a haze of heat, her thoughts were further away than the horizon itself.

“So affected of people to pretend not to like food,” she said, “or, if it is genuine, it shows they are partly imbecile, lacking the sense of taste. Yes, what Martin wants is to be chucked into an artistic milieu to see what he is really worth. And the artistic milieu is exactly what he hasn’t got. He is starving, he is living on himself. Now, no artist except the very greatest artist can do that, and even then he dies very quickly. He wants to be soaked and steeped in art. Paris, now! There is the artistic milieu there; but the music is generally atrocious—nearly as bad as in London. He could lunch at the Café Champêtre then.”

“Why do you wish him to do that?” asked Lord Flintshire.

“Dear Flints, because the cooking is so good. The really artist is a gourmet in everything, including food. Think of the story of Beethoven and the soup. He threw it in the footman’s face because it was cold. He could not bear that it should not be hot. Cold soup in one’s face—how horrible!—and thrown by Beethoven! Even that would not make it pleasant. Certainly Martin has the instincts of a great artist. He has a sense of form in all he does, which, I expect, means nothing to your brother. Certainly also he has the sense of form in himself. My dear, he is an absolute Adonis, and as slim as asparagus, the English kind.”

Lord Flintshire laughed.

“And when do you expect this paragon?” he asked.

“After lunch. To let Martin go on learning Greek and curacies is like looking on at somebody being slowly murdered. Pray do as I tell you and get him away from that terrible parsonage. Why, the word is enough to upset an artist. It sounds so like parsnips.”

“I feel sure his father would never consent to let him run free in Paris,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because he has the insular distrust of Paris as a residence for the young.”

“My dear Flints,” she said, with some impatience, “if a young man is going to get into messes and make mudpies, he will make them anywhere. Surely it is the least desirable thing in the world that he should make them in the parsonage. Yes. You see your brother has so much character himself that he doesn’t seriously think that anybody else has got any.”

“I wish you would say these things to him,” said Lord Flintshire.

“I will, if I get an opportunity. But if not Paris, London, Rome, anywhere. Take poor Martin’s collar off, and let him roll in the grass. Yes, let us turn. Surely it is lunch-time. But do put up a pergola here all down the terrace and leave out the earwigs. My angels, we are going to our dinners.”

She turned, her very high heels clicking on the hard gravel of the terrace, and paused a moment.

“The mistake in principle which your fascinating brother is making,” she said, “lies in thinking that every one is cast in the same mould, which is his own, and has to be educated in the same manner. Whereas one of the few things of which we can be absolutely certain is that everybody is cast in different moulds. What fools people are really! Fancy trying to make a scholar or a parson of poor Martin! Such a waste, too, as well as an impossibility. Sunningdale might as well insist on my taking lessons in juggling or mathematics. Don’t you hate conjuring-tricks? What is the point of cutting open a loaf of bread and finding a globe of gold-fish inside it? Nobody in their senses could call me stupid, but I am morally incapable of adding up three figures correctly. Why? Simply because the process bores me, and I therefore do it wrong.”

“That is a fascinating theory of education for the young.”

“It may or may not be fascinating, but it is certainly true. The point of education is to develop any taste you may possess, not to bore you with the acquisition of knowledge. Ah, there is Stella Plympton coming to meet us. She has immense charm, and look at the way her head is set on her shoulders. Really, to have a neck is the only thing that matters. A girl with a neck has only to say ‘Good-morning’ for every one to exclaim, ‘How brilliant!’ Whereas people like me, with no neck, have to talk from morning till night at the tops of our voices, and wear ridiculous hats, or else every one says, ‘Poor dear, how much she has aged, and how very dull and heavy she is.’ Flints, I have immense trials. I often wonder how I keep up as I do, and am so frequently the life and soul of the party. Yes. Every one made in the same mould indeed! Stella and me, for instance. Flints, your brother is an imbecile. I don’t propose to learn Greek, because he can talk it in his sleep. Helen, too! Is she to be kept in that dreadful parsonage all her life, and see nobody but district visitors? I think we ought to take your brother’s family in hand. He neglects them shamefully; he ought to be prosecuted for criminal neglect. A man has a duty towards his children.”

Lord Flintshire laughed.

“And only last night I was telling Sidney that his sense of duty towards them was too strong.”

Again Lady Sunningdale’s attention rushed headlong away with the bit in its teeth; it was so rapid that one could not say it wandered.

“The last act of the ‘Götterdämmerung’!” she exclaimed. “My dear, they gave it superbly the other night; at Covent Garden, too, of all places—though the ravens did come in ten bars too soon, and Siegfried had to throw them away. I never slept for a week afterwards.”

The performance in question, therefore, must have taken place at least a week ago, for there was no manner of doubt that when Martin arrived, an hour or so after lunch, Lady Sunningdale was snatching a brief interval of much-needed repose after her sen’night vigil under the cedar on the lawn. The rest of the party, with the exception of Stella Plympton, had dispersed to spend the afternoon in what she considered the violent English fashion; that is to say, Frank Yorkshire and her brother had gone to play golf. Lord Flintshire had taken Lady Sunningdale’s daughter for a ride, and Lord Sunningdale himself, who had an insatiable mania for losing large sums of money in what he euphemistically called farming, had gone to feel horses’ legs and poke pigs in the back with the Scotch bailiff. Martin, in consequence, who had walked over the fields from the terrible parsonage and approached his uncle’s house from the garden side, found an idyll of placidity occupying the stage below the cedar, for a young woman of about his own age was sitting with an air of extreme content doing nothing whatever, and in a basket-chair close by was Lady Sunningdale, recuperating after the “Götterdämmerung.” Martin had formed a somewhat copious subject of conversation during lunch, and it required no particular exercise of ingenuity on Stella’s part to guess who the tall, straw-hatted figure was. From him again she looked at Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers, and glancing back to Martin raised her eyebrows, as if to ask what had better be done. Then she rose noiselessly from her chair, and beckoning to him with a little amused, friendly gesture, walked quietly away from the immediate neighbourhood.

“You must be Mr. Challoner,” she said, holding out her hand; “and Lady Sunningdale, apparently exhausted by the prospect of your arrival, is snatching a few moments of repose. What are we to do, then? Shall we wake her and risk her immediate displeasure, or let her sleep and risk her ultimate displeasure? We are quite certain to decide wrong.”

Much as Martin liked Lady Sunningdale, his instant and instinctive decision was not to wake her, for an enforced tête-à-tête with Stella had its obvious attractions. She was nearly as tall as he, and her dark-grey eyes almost on a level with his. Her face was a short oval, slightly and charmingly irregular in feature, the nose a little tip-tilted, the mouth a little full. This, set on the neck, which, according to Lady Sunningdale, could supply the place of intellectual brilliance, made a very good reason for risking the ultimate, not the immediate displeasure.

“My name is Stella Plympton, by the way,” the girl went on. “Pray excuse my introducing so stupid a topic. A person’s name matters so very little, does it not? But sometimes it is inconvenient not to know uninteresting things, like names, and the hours at which trains leave stations. Aren’t you thirsty after your walk? Will you not go and forage for fluids? And what are we to do?”

Martin looked at her with his direct lucid gaze.

“No fluid for me, thanks,” he said. “What do you advise? One can’t go and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’”

Stella laughed.

“I couldn’t,” she said; “but I think you might, if you felt disposed. She adores you, you know.”

Martin laughed also, flushing slightly.

“I adore her,” he said. “She makes me laugh all the time. And I love laughing.”

“So do I,” she said. “So please go and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’ I’m sure it would make me laugh. You won’t? Then a false and conventional code of politeness dictates that I should inflict my company on you, though you would probably rather be left alone. Anyhow, do not let us grill here in the sun like beefsteaks. There appears to be chairs in the shade over there. From there, too, we shall occupy a strategic position in which to observe Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers.”

There was a slightly sub-acid flavour about this of which Martin was just conscious. Stella, it seemed, was conscious of it too, for she explained:

“I feel rather a failure this afternoon,” she said, “for Lady Sunningdale asked me to stop and amuse her till you came. The result of my efforts to be entertaining, you can see!”

“Please amuse me instead,” said Martin.

“I daren’t try, for fear you should fall asleep too. How is your sister? I remember meeting her once. But, though I have never seen you before, I feel as if I knew you much better. Really at lunch we talked solidly and exclusively about you. You can do everything, they said, except pass examinations. That seemed to me very admirable, for it is notorious, as Lady Sunningdale said, that any fool can pass examinations. She deduced from that that you can’t be a fool.”

Martin laughed.

“I ought to apologize, then,” said he; “though really it isn’t my fault that I monopolized the conversation at lunch or that I am left on your hands now. I hope it wasn’t a long lunch.”

“Ah, but isn’t it the fault of your character that you get talked about?”

“But not that Lady Sunningdale goes to sleep after lunch. At least I don’t see how!”

Stella laughed too.

“You put it down to mere lunch?” she said. “But if one were disagreeable one might suggest that it was the conversation at lunch, not lunch itself, that led to the desire for repose. How rude of me!”

Martin looked across to the cedar; he was quite willing that Lady Sunningdale’s need for repose should not yet be satisfied.

“But I thought you settled that it was your efforts to amuse her that produced that result,” he said.

The sound of Stella’s laughter perhaps roused Lady Sunningdale, for she moved in her chair and suddenly sat bolt upright.

“Ah, she is awake,” said Stella. “We can peashoot each other no longer. What a pity!”

“But that at least is very polite of you,” said Martin, rising.

“And that is very modest,” she answered. “It might have been true.”

Shrill, staccato cries came from the cedar as the two walked back across the hot velvet of the lawn.

“Stella dear, it is too bad of you,” shrieked Lady Sunningdale. “I send for my own particular young man and you monopolize him all the afternoon. Martin, you perfidious monster. What do you mean by flirting with Stella under my very eyes? Did I close them a moment? I think I must have. Is it not tea-time? Where is Sahara? There is a terrible black dog of Flints’s. My dear, it is too hot for words, and have you walked all the way from the terrible parsonage to see me? That is too sweet of you. What have you and Stella been talking about? Stella dearest, if you would whistle three or four times for Sahara. Martin, Frank Yorkshire is here. So odd, two counties in the same house in another county. Is not geography detestable? Yes. I sat next your father last night. I don’t think I ever saw anybody so unlike as you two. I don’t think that’s grammar. Stella, you went fast asleep, I thought, in that chair, and when I woke up, I found it was me in the other. Where are the dogs? Martin, the ‘Götterdämmerung,’ was too exquisite! Ternina! Floods, I assure you—I wept floods, and at the critical moment I tugged at my necklace, and it broke, and a large pearl fell into the trombone below. Why did you not come up to town, as I told you, for it? Not the pearl—do not be so foolish.”